Tomcat Setup

There are several ways to set up Tomcat for running on different
platforms. The main documentation for this is a file called
RUNNING.txt. We encourage you to refer to that
file if the information below does not answer some of your questions.

Installing Tomcat on Windows can be done easily using the Windows
installer. Its interface and functionality is similar to other wizard
based installers, with only a few items of interest.

Installation as a service: Tomcat will be
installed as a Windows service no matter what setting is selected.
Using the checkbox on the component page sets the service as "auto"
startup, so that Tomcat is automatically started when Windows
starts. For optimal security, the service should be run as a
separate user, with reduced permissions (see the Windows Services
administration tool and its documentation).

Java location: The installer will provide a default
JRE to use to run the service. The installer uses the registry to
determine the base path of a Java 6 or later JRE, including the JRE
installed as part of the full JDK. When running on a 64-bit
operating system, the installer will first look for a 64-bit JRE and
only look for a 32-bit JRE if a 64-bit JRE is not found. It is not
mandatory to use the default JRE detected by the installer. Any
installed Java 6 or later JRE (32-bit or 64-bit) may be used.

Tray icon: When Tomcat is run as a service, there
will not be any tray icon present when Tomcat is running. Note that
when choosing to run Tomcat at the end of installation, the tray
icon will be used even if Tomcat was installed as a service.

Tomcat can be run as a daemon using the jsvc tool from the
commons-daemon project. Source tarballs for jsvc are included with the
Tomcat binaries, and need to be compiled. Building jsvc requires
a C ANSI compiler (such as GCC), GNU Autoconf, and a JDK.

Before running the script, the JAVA_HOME environment
variable should be set to the base path of the JDK. Alternately, when
calling the ./configure script, the path of the JDK may
be specified using the --with-java parameter, such as
./configure --with-java=/usr/java.

Using the following commands should result in a compiled jsvc binary,
located in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin folder. This assumes
that GNU TAR is used, and that CATALINA_HOME is an
environment variable pointing to the base path of the Tomcat
installation.

Please note that you should use the GNU make (gmake) instead of
the native BSD make on FreeBSD systems.

You may also need to specify -jvm server if the JVM defaults
to using a server VM rather than a client VM. This has been observed on
OSX.

jsvc has other useful parameters, such as -user which
causes it to switch to another user after the daemon initialization is
complete. This allows, for example, running Tomcat as a non privileged
user while still being able to use privileged ports. Note that if you
use this option and start Tomcat as root, you'll need to disable the
org.apache.catalina.security.SecurityListener check that
prevents Tomcat starting when running as root.

jsvc --help will return the full jsvc usage
information. In particular, the -debug option is useful
to debug issues running jsvc.

The file $CATALINA_HOME/bin/daemon.sh can be used as a
template for starting Tomcat automatically at boot time from
/etc/init.d with jsvc.

Note that the Commons-Daemon JAR file must be on your runtime classpath
to run Tomcat in this manner. The Commons-Daemon JAR file is in the
Class-Path entry of the bootstrap.jar manifest, but if you get a
ClassNotFoundException or a NoClassDefFoundError for a Commons-Daemon
class, add the Commons-Daemon JAR to the -cp argument when launching
jsvc.